Celcius
by Cascade Waters
Summary: Mercury moves... WARNING: Contains non-sexual spanking. Don't like, don't read.


Celcius

Rated: T _references to supernatural violence, spanking, graphic perspective, and intense situations_

Spoilers: All H--- Breaks Loose 1 & 2

Warnings: See the rating...

Disclaimer: I own the basic plot of this story and the timmikka... and a couple of bottles of rolaids. That's about it.

A/N: This is for a friend who wanted lots of cuddlesquish.

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_"Ow! Mama--!!"_

She winced as she heard the shrill voice shrieking, high and panicked and from oh so long ago, and she hesitated to look down, even though she knew what she'd see--because, after all, she'd been there the first time; the shrill voice had been hers, and she'd deserved every screaming second, every burning nerve ending, and more. She supposed having to watch (and hear) it again now was part of her penance, as were the memories. It made a certain twisted sense that because the past few days had been such a nightmare, that because, just as she'd learned that night in so long ago, her very existence had turned out to be a nightmare, she was now going to enter Hell through the horrors in her own mind.

_She'd been ten by the time that dry Independence Day week rolled around, sure then that she was about to step off into the free world of womanhood but, in reality, not standing on the cusp of anything but trouble. In the years since her father's death, she'd been increasingly hard to handle, pushing every limit over and over again, partially because she needed to know that her mother wouldn't give up and leave her, too, and partially because she was just determined to have her way, to have control over something more than just her attitude. Her mother, single and running a small business as well as raising a budding hellion, had been on the brink of a meltdown for weeks, and one evening after a day of nothing but friction between mother and daughter, one of the crusty new patrons had gleefully told the little girl that he'd overheard her mother muttering about mailing her to the other side of the world._

_She'd been deeply hurt, but rather than going to her mother right then for reassurance, the child had decided that if she wasn't wanted, she would leave on her own terms, and never return. Of course, being that she was ten, 'never' was supposed to last about a week--just long enough for her to prove that she was too old for rules and scolding, that she was ready to do more than sweep the floors... and to give her mother time to forget to be angry with the girl and start to miss her. Odd, to know that even then she had been terrified on some level that she wouldn't be missed._

_So, with all the righteous indignation and purpose she could cram into her reedy little frame, she had proceeded to jimmy a few locks and stow away in the backseat of their most interesting new 'regular,' whose plaid shirts had hidden hard muscles and whose dark eyes and dark voice had promised fascinating stories._

_Fortunately (or so she'd thought at the time,) after he'd taken to the road around midnight that night, he'd let her believe that he was oblivious to her presence for over a hundred miles before casually pulling over and inviting her to take a pit stop in some nearby bushes and then to munch on some of her own mother's pie. He hadn't asked too many questions, hadn't shoved a bunch of stupid rules down her throat, hadn't made her call her mother, and he'd even let her hunt a fisherman's ghost with him the next night, demanding only that she make sure it wasn't him before firing the .22 he'd put in her hands. She hadn't had to shoot at all, which was good, considering that her hands had been sweaty and shaking when he'd retrieved her from her lookout post. She'd had a feeling that he'd known then, but he hadn't commented, and had even taken her out again the next night near some tired farmland to hunt a timmik, which had been a new concept for her._

_It had been so new to her, in fact, that she hadn't known that timmikka were odd demidemons that fed off of human energy until they either drained, or gained power by arranging the violent deaths of, their hosts, deaths accomplished with the consent of the host. She also hadn't known that timmikka preferred to possess children for their purer energy and tractibility. _

_She'd been aware every second, from the initial jolt to the sickening horror. Possession hadn't just been scary or annoying--it had hurt, as though every cell in her body was being pulled apart and ground together at the same time. She'd also gotten both less and more of an education than she'd planned, able to disjointedly see and feel everything the timmik did with her body, but powerless to stop or even redirect any of her body's motions. She'd seen her hands stealing and vandalizing and even injuring a few small animals. The timmik had quickly grown bored, though, as the rural area offered little in the way of malicious entertainment; the demidemon had wanted power, and it hadn't taken long for it to find its opportunity. _

_This far out in the country, the police hadn't bothered to enforce any ordinances about fireworks, so no one would have been surprised to have found the crate of crackers and rockets and fuses just inside of one of the old barns, placed stupidly near a tractor and pickup truck surrounded by cans of gasoline. The brilliance of the barn owners had apparently extended even farther, as the girl had soon watched her fingers close over a red and white box, felt through her fingertips the rough strip on one side, heard the rattling whisper of the matches inside; the timmik may not have been native to her world, but either it had been unusually clever for its ilk or it had fed off of the girl's knowledge of matches--in a matter of minutes, several of the fireworks had been lit, a rocket had been shot straight through a stand of gas cans, and the old wooden barn had become a tinderbox. The first explosion had been mostly noise, but the force of the second had sent the girl sailing back through the partially open door to land almost ten feet from the barn; ironically, because the timmik could only benefit from her death if she consented to her own demise, it had used most of its remaining power to cushion her small frame just enough to prevent serious injury. It had pulled her to her feet, ignoring the bruises and strains, reveling in the spectacular noises and the malevolent light and the heat that had roiled out to wash over her._

_Then the timmik had begun to whisper to her inside her own head, crooning in tender tones, like a loving guardian tucking long blonde hair behind her ear and stroking her smooth cheek, and its sweet nothings had been soft and relentless verbalizations of what some part of her seemed to know: it had told her that she and the fire were the same--that she blazed with an intolerable fury, that she consumed everything in her path, that she left no one unburnt. It had reminded her that she had driven her own mother to the point of wanting to send her far away, and that her father would have been so ashamed that she was his daughter, that she would always damage whatever she touched; it had plucked out and given voice to her private fear that she was fundamentally wrong. Giving her only a few moments to face these 'truths,' the timmik had then gently advised her to watch the fire, to bathe in its heat, to appreciate its beauty, to hear its invitation in its crackle and roar; the demidemon had cooed to the little girl to accept the invitation, to join the fire, to step into the heart of the inferno and finally be where she belonged, the only place she could ever be wanted or truly loved. It had murmured to her that walking into the fire would be the best thing that she could ever do for anyone, especially those who knew her. It had told her how easy that act of selflessness would be, just a few steps, just a handful of heartbeats separating her from the warmth and safety of the one thing she couldn't hurt. The voice of the timmik had been like simmered molasses, liquid and sweet and hot, singeing her soul just as the heat from the fire was scalding her throat and scorching her lungs, and she would never be sure later whether it had been the voice or the flames that had drawn the tears from her eyes and then boiled them from her face. All she had known at the time was that the voice was right. It had told her the truth that no one else had yet dared, the truth she'd been so afraid and so certain that she would hear when her mother would finally snap, when everyone else in her life would finally decide that she wasn't worth the trouble of kindness anymore, and it had done it gently, with what could almost be mistaken for love. It had given her a chance to make things better, to fix the damage she'd done, a chance to belong to something and to help her mother. It had told her that it would forgive her if only she'd do what she knew was right, if only she'd give herself over and become the fire. The demidemon had told her how the flames would cleanse her of her wrongness, of how it would clean what she had dirtied with her sooty hands and sullen eyes. It had shown her the way._

_And then it had released her feet._

_Even as startled as she'd been, she had hardly hesitated before moving, her steps tiny as she'd picked her way through ash and embers and piles of burning debris, not even flinching as a stray rocket had hissed past her, flames licking at the side of her denim-clad knee. Drawn by the crackling caress of the fire, unable to process the tightening of her skin, she'd raised an arm straight out in front of her, fingers slightly bent as though taking a hand held out for her. Tongues of flame had flicked up, salivating smoke as they anticipated the taste of young flesh that would be theirs in mere seconds. For once in her life, she had meant to do exactly as she'd been told, the one good thing she could accomplish._

_When the flames had been ripped away from her, they had taken half of her soul with them, so that when she'd found herself facing the dark of the night, held tight against something large and hard, she had tried to cry out, but her mouth was so dry, her lungs so shrivelled that even breathing in had been agony; her mouth had worked helplessly for a moment before fingers hard as stone had forced something onto her tongue, something that had tasted like cloves and lime and had made her taste buds burst and her tongue eventually go numb from the shock. Unfortunately, the rest of her hadn't been able to escape into numbness as she'd been ripped apart, piece by piece and yet all at once, the pain searing and steaming and finally too much for her young mind to handle._

_When she'd come around, she'd been still for a few moments as her senses had slowly begun to return to her. She'd no longer felt as if she were combusting, but she'd missed the fire, sure that somehow she had managed to mess up even that. _

_She'd been moved, as she'd gradually realized. Her ears had still been filled with the roaring of the fire, but she'd evenutally been able to pick out a roaring and a thrumming that hadn't matched the inferno. Her eyes had been so dry that it had taken several minutes before she'd been able to see anything but afterimages of the flames, and what had replaced them had seemed a confused mix of dark lines that might have been colors; she'd gotten the impression that they grew darker in irregular patches, patches that had proven to be damp against her cheek. She hadn't thought that she'd ever get the scents of burning earth and limey cloves out of her nose, but the damp spots had begun to smell dank and briny--sweat. The lines had covered an odd form, and it had taken her another couple of minutes to guess that it was a shoulder._

_She'd seen something glimmer just... there, and she'd reflexively reached up a hand to explore it. She'd been trying to count the holes in the plastic button with her finger when she'd begun to understand something._

_She'd raised a hand._

_She had raised a hand._

_She had been alone in her own body._

_She'd been suddenly so tired that nothing had wanted to move, but she'd needed to be sure, so she'd begun to move her limbs, making sure that they'd still worked._

_"Lay still." The command had come, rough and low, from somewhere behind the buttons, somehow having found its way out, and she'd begun to obey before she'd even realized that she'd heard it. Pulling her head back and squinting her dry eyes in the dark, she'd seen that she was held against the chest and shoulder of a large man, and that the fingers that had fed her the herbs were also the fingers that had begun feeling all of her bones and joints for injuries. She had lacked the energy to free herself but had reflexively tried to pull away from his touch, which had only gotten her more tightly gripped and an even rougher command to hold still. She'd tried to search her addled brain but couldn't remember whether he had sounded so gruff in the car, not that she'd had the energy to care at that moment. She might've been freed from the clutches of the timmik, but she'd still been locked in the grip of the fire; the shadows cast on the leaves of the nearby trees by the dancing light of the fire behind her had mocked her, branding her a traitor just as the heat from the flames had branded her its own. Covered in sweat, she'd begun to shiver, but she hadn't felt cold--hadn't felt anything but exhaustion that had all but melted her marrow and the pain of a burn so deep that it had seemed that she herself had danced hand in hand with the sun. She hadn't been able to imagine ever being cool again._

_She hadn't known, or cared, where the man had been taking her, but she had thought that she should have been fighting to get back to the blaze. So she had been surprised that she could still be surprised when, a few moments later, the hunter who'd let her stow away had sauntered toward her, her first indication that the man who had held her had truly been a stranger. The hunter had asked the stranger what had happened, acting as though he'd never seen the girl before and had just arrived, and the stranger, ignoring the long gun in the hunter's hands, had barely slowed, biting out a reply that had left no doubt what he'd thought of the hunter and his acting skills. The little girl had listened, knowing vaguely that she should have been impressed, as the hunter had pointed out the stranger's fury and had demanded the girl back for her safety, only earning a snort from the stranger; the hunter had given up and walked away, leaving the girl at the mercy of the angry stranger. _

_Seconds or centuries later, the stranger had slowed and then stopped, and the girl had found herself bundled into the backseat of a car and buckled in at the middle of the seat; she'd had a moment alone in the silence of the space, realizing that the roar of the fire in her ears had faded a bit, before the driver's door had opened and the stranger had placed himself behind the wheel. She had noticed, with a kind of detached awareness that awareness itself was beginning to return, that this backseat had been cleaner than the hunter's, although she had spotted something shiny between the seat and the back that had proven to be a mostly-buried Hershey bar wrapper, and the lingering scent from some long-melted crumbs had begun to make her hungry until she'd breathed in too fully through her nose and almost wretched at the burn of cloves and lime._

_The stranger hadn't spoken to the girl at first; he'd fastened his own seatbelt and started the car, but instead of pulling out onto the narrow gravel path, he'd dug a clunky cell phone from his pocket and had dialed a number. She hadn't been able to see the number, and he hadn't given the other party time to comment. "I found her. She's in one piece. We're coming your way. Four hours." He'd ended the call just seconds after starting it, and she'd once again been left alone with him._

_He'd driven in silence for awhile, leaving her alone with her thoughts, before he'd finally decided to speak, and when he had, she'd begun to fully understand that even though she hadn't met him, this stranger had obviously known her too well, and that her freedom had been soundly revoked. He'd said that he knew she wasn't broken or bleeding because he'd checked and that she would be fine if she cooperated. Then he'd proceeded to dictate orders, rules for her behavior while in his car and anywhere else with him, demanding that she obey him and that she treat him with respect because he was an adult and she was a child and she didn't have to like him or trust him, but that she could trust that she would not like the consequences if she defied him. He'd added that he'd heard that she'd taken off with a hunter, and that her daddy would have tanned her little hide for doing something so dangerous and scaring her mama like that. They'd both been surprised when she'd opened her mouth and muttered that he hadn't known what he was talking about, that her mama wouldn't be scared, that her mama would be happy. She'd been even more surprised when he had slammed on the brakes, stopping the car in the middle of the (blessedly deserted) state highway, and had turned around to stare at her for a moment, expression too shadowed for her to read, before slowly suggesting that she shut her mouth and save her strength because she would need it soon enough. A few mintues later, in a burst of desperate realization, she'd begged him not to mention her possession to anyone, at which point he'd snorted and informed her that that was her job._

_She'd felt as if she'd never sleep again, but her weariness had kept her from pushing any more; she had been unable to get comfortable, her clothes sticking to her sweat-drenched little body and her skin still irritated from the mock-sunburn, and the next few hours had been both the longest and the shortest she could remember. She hadn't known where he'd been taking her, hadn't been sure that she cared, but she'd known that it couldn't be good, so she'd tried to figure out how to get away, but her mind had kept going back to the fire, to the timmik whispering in her ear, to the only place she'd thought she could be wanted._

_She hadn't been aware of the car stopping, but the stranger's hands as he'd leaned in through the open back door and unbuckled her seatbelt had brought her back to reality; she hadn't had time to protest his picking her up before he'd firmly shushed her, standing up with her cradled across his arms and shutting the car door with his foot and then starting around the car and across the rocky ground. She had fixed her gaze on the dull gray surface they had been crossing, and had been surprised when the stranger had stopped walking. The little girl had turned her head disinterestedly to meet her new captor..._

_...and had found herself face-to-face with her mother._

_Her mother, always casually together to the eye, had looked disarrayed somehow, but her smoldering gaze had been dead-on as she'd fixed her daughter with a look that had too many parts for the worn-out young mind to parse. The stranger had held out the girl, and her mother had taken her in the same cradled position, and then the stranger had turned and left without another word. Soon, the girl had found herself alone with her mother and with the heat and weight of the silence. Her mother had taken her inside the the apartment behind the business and to the bathroom, stripped her down despite the feeble protests, and given her a lukewarm bath which had hurt and helped at the same time; after looking her over with embarrassing thoroughness for any injuries, the mother had declared that the girl would live, at least for the time being, and had gotten the small figure into a soft old t-shirt that could have been a dress on the child, and had put her to bed for a few hours. The girl had not been able to sleep, so she'd lain in bed, wondering what would happen in the morning._

_The new day had brought more heat, the sunlight filtering in through the ugly old sheer pink curtains intensifying the sunburn sensation that hadn't gone away. She had begun to feel sick to her stomach, as though something in her middle had liquified, and the smell of eggs and bacon cooking had nearly sent her vomiting. Her eyes had still felt gritty, the backs of her eyelids like sandpaper, and when she'd begun to gnaw on the nail of her left little finger, she'd coughed and dry-spat as the soot caked in her nail bed had clashed with the ever-present cloves and lime that had lingered on her just-waking tongue. Dehydrated and too tired to move, the little girl had stared at the dingy pastel wallpaper and had known that an important thought was playing at the edges of her mind, but hadn't been able to grasp it. _

_Then her door had opened and her mother had entered, and the little girl hadn't been able to see anything besides her mother's eyes, swollen and red and hot as though the woman had spent the night chopping onions. The girl had not registered the tray her mother had carried, though her stomach had protested again at the smell of food, and her body had refused to be fed; she'd waited for the eyes to change, for the look of disgust that she had known must come because she had been sure that the events of the previous night--her possession, the crimes done by her hand, the aura of something so unnatural--must have shown, but the look had not come. Instead, she'd found there worry, relief, and... anger. Simmering, seething, burning anger that had demanded to be poured out, set free. The eyes had not released it, and the voice, when the girl had finally begun to understand it, had been controlled, contained, but she had not been able to imagine something so hot not breaking free somehow, and she had known that she alone would bear the blast, that she alone was made for that heat._

_She had felt the shock of ice and cloth, another kind of burning, in patches against her raw skin, and had realized that her mother had been tending to her while speaking. Her mother had demanded to know why the girl had done this, and after a moment the child had realized that her mother had wanted her to explain why she'd run away; it had been several minutes before the girl had remembered why, and as she'd answered, she'd felt herself returning to that level of awareness. She hadn't mentioned the timmik, the name of the hunter, or anything more than that she'd found someone who had let her hunt with him, and when her mother had demanded to know how the stranger had found her, the eyes troubled as the woman had muttered that even he would never have allowed such a young child to hunt, the girl had honestly not been able to answer; she'd supposed that she should have wondered more about how he'd found her and how he'd evidently known what to do to free her, but all she'd been able to tell her mother was that he'd mentioned somehow hearing that she'd been missing and had apparently decided to rat her out._

_Her mother had stood then, eyes and voice snapping, telling the girl that she should count herself lucky that he'd saved her hide because a ten-year-old could have no idea what kind of dangers could have found her. The woman had silenced herself before elaborating and destroying that right of childhood, not knowing that her daughter had had that innocence seared from her soul by a being from the fires of H---; her mother had left the room, coming back minutes later with several pint mugs of ice water and demanding that the child keep drinking them to rehydrate her system. She'd ordered the girl to stay in bed and stay quiet, and had warned her that disobeying would have been the worst possible idea. The mother had checked the window, lain fresh salt, picked up the cold breakfast, and quietly shut the door, and though it made no sense, the girl could have sworn that she'd heard a muffled sob from the hallway._

_The hours had passed in a haze, the water burning as it had bathed her spiced tongue and licked at her tormented esophagus, but her body, unable to tolerate the notion of food, had at least insisted on devouring the water; she'd drunk too fast, in fact, twice leaning over her old pink trashcan and bringing up the now-acidic water amid cramps, before finally slowing out of sheer exhaustion and giving her fragile system a chance to process the fluid. Feeling more alert, and needing a distraction from the pain, the little girl had studied her hands, her feet, even the old pink-and-green quilt bunched at the corner of the bed where she'd shucked its warmth, thinking idly that the colors she'd loved so much as a tyke had now begun to make her vaguely ill. _

_And that had been the moment when she'd grasped that important bit of reality. Her environment had not changed, but she had. The safety and simplicity of her childhood, those elements that had made her so frustrated just days before, had been burned away; she had not been the same little girl anymore, but neither had she become a woman. She had become... she hadn't been sure what, but whatever she had been, it had been too old not to know what had lurked in the night, and too young to understand what to do about it. She'd known then that her mother would have had the answer, but she'd been too afraid of the disgust, too afraid that the answer would have confirmed that the girl was no different than the things her friend had hunted. She'd come to understand that he'd known what would happen when he'd taken her after the timmik, but though that should have angered her, she'd considered it her own fault for not having known, not having somehow been prepared to fight, and though the timmik would haunt her day and night for as long as she lived, the hunter had given her a kind of gift by showing her how helpless she'd really been. She should have wished for the safety and comfort of her mother's embrace, and she had, but she'd not been able to bring herself to unload all of this to her mother, partially because she had taken all the blame and had not wanted to prove again to her mother just how much of a shame she'd been, and partially because she'd been terrified that her mother would have tried to relieve her pain, and the thought of losing the burning--the reminder of what she'd been and where she'd belonged--had been as unbearable as the burning itself. The hunter had used her as bait and had given her a gift, the stranger had saved her by ripping her away from the only gift she'd been capable of giving, and her mother might have known what to do to fix her but had not deserved to be burnt in the curse of knowing._

_Her mother had known what to do about one thing, though; when she'd returned to the room during the lull between lunch and dinner, she'd brought her old wooden hairbrush. She'd nodded to see three pints of water gone and the salt line in front of the window untouched, then she'd sat down on the side of the bed, picked up her daughter, quietly lectured her about running away, and then flipped the small body over her lap, raising the shirt and starting to roast the tiny bottom. For all her guilt, the girl had still panicked at the building blaze in her backside, feeling all of the pain but more worried about losing control, about being at the mercy of another being, which, at that moment, hadn't felt so different from having been possessed. She'd known in her subconscious that she had been safe with her mother, that the two kinds of loss of control were totally different, but even as she'd longed to turn herself over to the fire in the barn and the fire in her bottom, she'd also been terrified. Where she had submitted willingly the night before, she had fought now, screaming and bucking, not understanding that she'd needed to be accepted by the maker of the fire without being destroyed in the process. _

_The tears had returned, bathing her eyes and tempering the herbal fire in her mouth with warm salt, and when she'd been suddenly turned, sore but unbruised, into her mother's shoulder, she'd sobbed herself into oblivion, only realizing hours later that she'd awakened from a dreamless sleep, deep in the night, still in her mother's arms. She'd held her secret as tightly as her mother had held her, she'd still been determined to know more than her mother had thought anyone should have to understand at any age, but that night, the heat had been replaced, at least for a while, by warmth and hardness and softness and the smell of gardenia soap._

She remembered every detail, but on this night she found herself witnessing only the paddling she'd endured, remembering every sizzling moment but unable to feel even that measure of warmth, this time able to see the flashing in her mother's eyes and the tears that had spilled from those same eyes throughout the whole ordeal. Over the years, the girl had healed to some extent and had regained some confidence in her relationship with her mother, along with a renewed sense of indignant frustration, had gotten used to the way every part of her life fed the burning or scorched someone else, but on this night, so far in the future and yet so buried in the pain of the past, she was certain again that her mother's tears had been born of shame.

She had started to lose count of how many times she'd relived that paddling when the scene had suddenly changed--now it showed her the last events she'd lived before going into this fugue state, with a cruel and sickening twist within a twist.

_She had been in the middle of a triple shift, covering for both the regular bartender and the day waitress. It hadn't been so bad--she had been working hard since childhood, first in the apartment and kitchen and then, when she'd reached legal age, her mother's bar, so long hours hadn't been a big deal, one of the points that had gotten her this job, and she hadn't minded earning some extra money while Bernie went to night court and Shelby planned to go for her first sonogram. On top of that, the evening had gone well and the night had been quiet and slow, and she'd basically had the place to herself since just after last call, so once she'd finished wiping down the tables and sweeping the floor, she'd polished the ancient jukebox and then switched on the TV over the bar, hoping for some background noise that hadn't included the Dixie Chicks, and, finding the choices slim in the pre-dawn hour, had landed on the first news report of the day. She'd been half-listening, straightening the ale and lager bottles behind the bar, when her ears had caught mention of a fire at her old stomping grounds. She had glanced up just as the newscaster had mentioned the name of the business, and her breath had caught; when the words 'full of patrons, no survivors' had filled the air, three bottles had shattered at her feet, but she hadn't felt the glass slicing into her feet between the straps, hadn't felt the hairline fracture in her right foot, hadn't felt the sting of the alcohol in the fresh cuts, hadn't noticed the blood flowing from the collection of wounds. Hadn't felt anything, in fact, even two hours later when the owner had popped in to pick up some paperwork and had found her, standing apparently catatonic in a pool of liquor and dried blood, and had called an ambulance. _

_She hadn't registered much, had watched with detached disinterest as she'd been ferried to the hospital and changed into a paper gown and hooked up to machines that had told the doctors nothing; she'd endured about half an hour of that before being left alone, which was when she'd mechanically risen from the gurney and slipped out through the ambulance bay doors, hotwiring the car her boss had driven behind the ambulance and taking it back to the bar, where she had left the keys in his ignition, broken through a window to retrieve her backpack from the locked bar, and had taken her own rattletrap and headed for her roots. Working without conscious thought, it had been a minor miracle that she hadn't driven off the road; she'd come to the wreckage of her childhood home, to the still-smoldering embers of everything positive in her life; she had found the token that a close friend had never taken off; she had stood among the rubble, letting the ash wash over her bandaged feet; and she had known that it had finally happened--the fire that she had abandoned had come back for her, and in her absence it banned her from any chance of redemption and had taken her mother. _

_She hadn't felt grief, hadn't shed a tear. She hadn't felt anything beyond the silence and the sucking stillness of the..._

_Cold. _

_She had been so cold. _

_She hadn't seen how she could still breathe, couldn't seem to find the air. It had seemed as though her lungs, as shrivelled from this absence of heat as they had been so long ago at the fingertips of the fire, were being sucked out of her chest from both directions. She had known that her heart had stopped, that the world had stopped, when the flames had devoured all that had mattered, all that had forgiven her. The burning within her had died with her mother; every hour, every minute, every beat had taken her farther out into space, into the cold where nothing could live. She might have remained frozen in that spot until blood poisoning or dehydration had taken her body, but she'd had one last duty to perform._

She would never recall searching for or finding them, would never have a memory of getting there, but gotten there she had, and the dream showed her the first clear memory she had after the news report, the last clear memory she expected to have in her life.

_She had barely been able to move her legs, unable to feel the pain from her feet, still feeling as though every fiber of her being was contracting with the death of the warmth. It had been deep into a summer night, but she had shivered from the ice at her core. She'd been aware of every passing moment, her vision clear though the rest of her seemed to have all but shut down. Close to falling, covered with goosebumps and shaking as if to come apart at the seams, she had stumbled to the peeling door and thumped it with her forehead. Her knees had been giving out when the door had opened, light flooding out over her before it had been blocked by a form. She had heard him calling her name in confused alarm but hadn't been able to reply; all that would come from her had been a tortured croaking of, "All... gone... Mom... gone..." Just before her vision had begun to tunnel, she'd looked in and seen his brother, who had refused to look at her--shame and disgust at her disgrace, her failure for the second time to give herself to the fire and give her mother the gift of freedom, her failure to save all that had been good in that place._

And though she was fairly certain that the rest hadn't happened in life, she was also certain that she was doomed to watch it happen over and over again in death...

_The older brother had reached for her, as if to catch her, and the younger had reluctantly moved closer, but at the point of contact between the older man's fingers and her side, he had burst into flames, from the fingertips on, flames enveloping his body within seconds and spreading to his brother and the rest of the room. All around her, the fire had grown and raged, and as the younger brother had screamed in unspeakable agony, the older had looked at her, calm though his face was beginning to boil grotesquely, and had said in a sickeningly sweet murmur, "Didn't you know that this would happen? Weren't you warned? Didn't you understand that this would be the price of your 'salvation?' You rejected the gift when it was offered; did you really believe that it would be offered again, that you could be forgiven? You were selfish, little girl--when you turned away, you d--ned us all; you have brought the fires of H--- down on all who mattered to you." His flaming hand had stroked her cheek even as the rest of him had melted like cheap wax, the smell of burning flesh mixing with the lime and cloves in her nostrils, and his whispered words had floated in his wake, "Was it worth it?"_

_She had tried to scream, but hadn't been able to make a sound. She'd tried to shake her head, only to find her neck frozen in place. All of her had been frozen. She'd wanted to cry, wanted to plead; she'd wanted to make it right, to take it back, to go back and fight the grip of the stranger, to have walked just a little faster that night. She'd wanted to take their places, to give herself over, to bring them all back and die in their stead. She'd wanted to bathe in the fire._

_All around her, everything had been ablaze, a raging inferno._

_And she hadn't been able to feel it._

_Even when the older brother had brushed his firy fingers across her skin, she had felt nothing but the growing chill. _

_She'd wondered idly how long it would be before she'd reached absolute zero._

_She'd relived this horrific scene countless times before she'd heard it._

_A voice. Calling to her. _

_It had been calling her to come back, though back to where, she hadn't known. She hadn't known who could want her, and she hadn't been ready to leave the fire; she'd wanted to beg until she'd be given another chance._

_But something about that voice had pulled at her, something that had buried itself in the ice at her core and would not let go... And she hadn't been able to resist..._

"Jo."

She woke on her side, eyes closed, her senses returning in odd little pieces--the fabric surrounding her felt a little damp, a little unfamiliar. She smelled sweat and something faintly floral. Someone was brushing her hair behind her ear. And her feet were throbbing.

Her mind didn't know what to do with these details, how to put them in some sort of order, but after a few minutes, the intensifying pain in her feet and the soothing sensation of the fingers on her forehead and the shell of her ear conspired to draw her into the moment, and, sure that she would see again the blindingly painful demise of her friends, she slowly opened her eyes.

And could see only...

Eyes.

Familiar eyes.

Impossible eyes.

Red-rimmed, swollen eyes supported by deep shadows and, as they widened, filled with fresh tears.

"Hey, baby." Her mother's voice was quiet, fractured in a thousand places.

"I'm dead."

The older woman smiled a little, and her hand, which had frozen mid-stroke, went to her daughter's cheek. "No, baby. You're gonna be just fine."

The girl had a hard time pulling her gaze from her mother's face, but she turned her head just slightly, neck stiff from having been in the same position for too long; instead of the fire or the nothingness of cold, deep space, she saw walls covered with textured dull gold and cream paper. More exploring led her eyes to a window shaded by dark blue drapes, a couple of cheap watercolors framed by thin gold plastic, a small cabinet open to reveal a television set, a microwave on top of a minifridge, and a wall behind which, she guessed, was the bathroom. She couldn't see the door of the motel room, and she was out of energy for exploring, closing her eyes as pain pierced her head.

"What is it, baby?" Ellen's voice was filled with concern.

"Nothing. Just... nothing." Jo rested her head on the pillow again, opening her eyes and trying to give her mother a reassuring smile. This felt better, laying here and just gazing at her mother as they lay face to face. She didn't really want to break the spell, but she had to know, had to understand how she could be alive, inches from a woman who'd died hours ago in a fire.

"What..." She croaked a little, for the first time realizing how dry her throat felt, and she was grateful when her mother handed her a translucent plastic cup with some cool water and a straw. The water felt so good in her mouth and throat that she almost wept. She thought briefly about how the water tasted like water always does from a motel cup, and that was when she realized that she could taste, that she could feel, that her world no longer consisted of lime and cloves and flame and ice; this did bring the tears, and as she closed her eyes and slowly fell into quiet sobs that seemed to come from nowhere, her mother's arms slipped around her, and Ellen tucked Jo's head into the hollow of her shoulder, combing through the long blonde hair with her fingers and murmuring reassurance into the younger woman's ear, occasionally pausing to kiss the shell of that ear. Ellen let her daughter cry, more than a little concerned at what was behind the wrenching sobs and the quivering body, but intensely grateful to have this moment.

When Jo finally wound down, she was reluctant to pull away from the comfort of being cuddled, but her feet were really bothering her and she needed to understand how this was all possible. "H-how?"

Ellen looked at her closely, confused. "How what, baby?"

"How are you h-here? How am I here?" Jo put in the effort to force her tired eyes to focus. "What... happened?"

Ellen studied her daughter's face, brushing away a few stray tears with the pad of her thumb. "What do you remember?"

Images from her dreams assaulted Jo, but she decided that those would stay locked away, that her mother didn't need to deal with them. "You... you were dead. You were dead! The roadhouse--" Her increasingly frantic words died away as Ellen placed a finger over Jo's lips.

"Oh, baby, I am so sorry! When the boys called me--" She noticed Jo's confused look. "Do you remember coming to the boys? Do you remember finding Dean and Sam?" Jo shook her head, not wanting to think about how foggy everything was. Ellen decided that she was going to have to back up. She took a deep breath.

"I messed up, baby; I messed up bad. I wasn't in the roadhouse when it was torched, and by the time I got back, there was nothing I could do. I know that I should have called you, should have found you, but I was just... I was so..." She struggled with her words and her emotions, her voice cracking again. "I couldn't see straight. I was just so... numb, and I couldn't think. I know you don't know what that's like--" She was startled when Jo nodded, and Ellen filed it away to question later. "It doesn't matter. I can't believe that I didn't go to you first; I can't explain why, really, I don't even really remember everything, but I messed up. I didn't know where you'd gone, I didn't think about you seeing the news, I didn't _think_--" She choked on her words, having to stop and look around as she tried to rein in the tears. She was surprised when her daughter enfolded her in a reversal from a few minutes ago, accepting her, forgiving her, letting her cry.

It took a few minutes for Ellen to pull herself together, and though she felt wrung-out and it was far from the first time she'd wept in the past few days, she also felt... cleansed. And she was keenly grateful for Jo's sensitivity and absolution; she didn't have a clue where it had come from, but she did know that just as she had become unable to stand herself, her child had, with a single silent gesture, restored her. She had always loved Jo and respected her strong spirit, but the girl had always seemed a little blind to anything and anyone outside of her own goals, and Ellen felt a twinge of guilt now that she she hadn't expected her daughter to be there for her. She'd think that the past few months of separation had changed her daughter, but she had a feeling that this had started long before, and that Ellen herself was responsible for being blind. She suspected that, although she would never apologize for trying to protect her child, her child really had become a woman. She knew, though, that the only thing she could do now was open her eyes and truly see her daughter as more than just Ellen's reason to go on surviving and working--to see Jo as a reason to really live and to appreciate it.

"I knew that..." Ellen took a deep breath, more centered as she picked up her story again, "I knew that something had happened, that I had to get to help; and the next thing I knew, I was in the salvage yard, facing down Bobby Singer and Dean. What happened with them after that, we can talk about later; what's important is that about a day after everything happened, Dean called me and said that you'd showed up at their motel room in the middle of the night, and that you were hurt. They said you..." She tried again. "They said you said something about me being gone, and then you passed out. Your feet were bleeding, and you were wearing a hospital gown." She smiled just a little as Jo glanced down under the covers, brow knitting in confusion. "They donated some clothes; don't worry--they didn't mess with the clothes or the gown until I got here. Anyway, the boys got you on a bed and fixed you up as best they could when you got here, but they didn't have a lot in the way of supplies, and they told me you were burning up." She noticed the shadow that passed through her daughter's eyes at this, but Jo just nodded for her to continue. "By the time I got here, your temperature was over 103; we were going to take you to the hospital, which is about a hundred miles away, but there was a doctor staying down the way who heard us talking about it outside, and he came and helped us clean up your feet and got some antibiotic injections. You scared us, little girl," she said, leaning closer to her daughter, "you had blood poisoning; Dr. Carter said that he'd love to know how your feet got so cut up and why no one stopped you when you left whatever hospital you'd been to."

To avoid having to try to answer those questions, which would involve more thought than her brain was willing to give right now, Jo looked around again and then turned back to her mother. "Where are the guys? Where's the doctor? They didn't leave you to do all the work, did they?"

Ellen narrowed her eyes in confusion. "The boys left us the room; Dr. Carter was stuck here because his car broke down, so Dean fixed it for him, to sort of help pay him back part-way, and then he had to get back to work once he was sure that you were going to be alright." Jo still looked chagrined. "Don't worry, hon, the boys stuck around until your fever broke. No one abandoned either of us. Not even Sam; he told me what happened when he was possessed. He knows better than most anybody that no one who's possessed is responsible for what happens during that time, but the poor boy was still too ashamed to look at you when he wasn't dressing your wounds."

Jo had to let the surprise of that last statement slide for now. "Until my--? But, but I've only been here..." Jo trailed off. "My fever broke?"

Ellen peered at Jo, placing her wrist against the girl's forehead, worried that the fever was back. "Baby, that was two days ago. This is the first time I've seen your eyes in..." She sighed painfully. "Too long. You were real sick for about four days there." Ellen closed her eyes briefly in pain, and when she opened them, she barely whispered through fresh tears, "I was about sure I was gonna lose you, if I hadn't already." Ellen was stunned at the surprise on Jo's face, but before she could really think about that, her daughter burrowed into her shoulder, holding on like she had when she was very small. Ellen cuddled her again, needing to just hold on, to enjoy the first time in years that her daughter had wanted to be held, to seriously consider just never... letting... go.

Jo couldn't believe it.

She was warm.

Not hot. Not burning up. Not lost in the jaws of a fire.

Not cold. Not floating alone, struggling to breathe in the depths of space.

She would burn again, her passion would return once she'd heard what had happened while she'd been thinking about extra shifts and empty bars, but she would never again be the burning; she would never again listen to that voice that wanted her to immolate herself.

And she would feel cool water and breezes and the caress of winter, but she would never again know absolute zero.

She was no longer standing on the edge of death, of losing herself to forces that had been hiding inside her own mind for years.

She was still Jo, still no stranger to extremes, still flawed, still mortal. She was still her mother's daughter, and though she needed to be reminded, she was still what her father had felt was worth fighting and dying to protect. She was still part of the story.

She was still more than she'd thought she could be.

She was warm.

And she was one more thing...

Jo tightened her hold on her mother, snuggling deeper into the comfort of a home that didn't depend on walls and windows. "I'm right here."


End file.
